24% Implemented Email Archiving, 19% Without Email Management System

In a recent third-party survey, nearly half of respondents say storage capacity utilization and management is the most challenging email-related chore in their companies, according to results released by C2C in a study conducted across 550 companies in the UK/US in March 2011 via Emedia.

Hundreds of network administrators, system managers and other IT professionals from organizations of all sizes responded to the survey; 48 percent said storage utilization and capacity management is most in need of improvement, while 32 percent chose email archiving and retention.
 
To mitigate email growth, 46 percent still use mailbox quotas and PSTs (Outlook Archives) as a method of managing mail system capacity. Just 24 percent of respondents have implemented email archiving while 19 percent have no formal email management system at all.
 
A significant number of respondents (36 percent) expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of flexibility of many email management products, citing too much business disruption and negative impact on users among other pitfalls. Requiring a separate web client to review stored emails and high ongoing management were also perceived as flaws in existing solutions.
 
"It is frightening that nearly half of companies rely on mailbox quotas and PSTs. Apart from the negative effects on productivity, the risk being taken by those companies is surprising," said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. "Data held in PSTs is not visible to the organization and therefore represents a high risk as the laws concerning finding and securing data become more stringently applied. In the UK, the compliance should make companies wary about storing data in an uncontrolled fashion."
 
Among the survey’s other findings, half of respondents say they search email for internal or legal matters 5 or more times a year with nearly a quarter of respondents indicating the need to do it 20 or more times a year.
 
"As the laws about data retention become more refined, and email volumes grow, companies need to be more specific about what they retain, rather than attempting to retain everything," says Hunt. "Choosing an email management system geared at purely reducing load on servers and/or meeting a perceived compliance requirement, rather than looking at the actual business need, is a risky path. IT Managers and their staff need to consult the business before making these investments, and one gets the feeling that it was price rather than business need that was the driver in choice of solution."